Findings confirm and extend previous work documenting demographic risks and highlight smoking, violent events, and social support in early onset asthma and wheezing. Findings illustrate the need for ecologically based interventions to treat asthma and wheezing in young children.

Text messaging has become an integral part of social life, especially among adolescents and young adults. As a potentially continuously accessible form of communication, texting may affect individuals’ psychosocial functioning in interesting—and unexplored—ways. The current study examines links among interpersonal stress, text messaging behavior, and 3 indicators of college students’ health and well-being: burnout, sleep problems, and emotional well-being. It was proposed that high rates of text messaging may exacerbate the effects of interpersonal stress on these aspects of students’ health and well-being. Participants included 83 first-year undergraduate students. Results of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that higher levels of interpersonal stress were significantly associated with compromises in all 3 areas of functioning. A higher number of daily texts was directly associated with more sleep problems. The number of daily texts moderated the association between interpersonal stress and both burnout and emotional well-being; interpersonal stress was associated with poorer functioning only at higher levels of texting. Promising future directions for research on texting behavior are discussed.

Research on co-rumination has investigated its relationship with internalizing symptoms, but few studies have addressed underlying maladaptive cognitive-affective processes that may play an important role in the maintenance of this relation. This study examines if Young’s schema domains mediate the relation between co-rumination and depression in a community sample of non-clinical young adults. Participants completed the Co-Rumination Questionnaire, Young Schema Questionnaire-L3, and Teate Depression Inventory. Correlations and path analysis were calculated for the full sample and separately by gender. The schema domains of Overvigilance/Inhibition and Other-Directedness fully mediated the relation between co-rumination and depression. When analyses were performed separately for males and females, mediation persisted only for females. Findings suggest that among young women, co-rumination with a friend may be associated with depressive symptoms because of its activation of specific maladaptive cognitive schemas. Better understanding of the content and processes underpinning co-rumination may have important implications for the prevention and treatment of depression.

Asthma is a disease of significant social magnitude that disproportionately affects children from minority and low-income backgrounds. Poor asthma management is one of the leading causes for high morbidity and mortality rates. In addition to conventional medications, many parents use complementary and alternative medication (CAM) to treat their child's asthma symptoms. This study explored the impact of CAM use on asthma control and risks for nonadherence to conventional medications in 66 parents of children with asthma. Positive parental beliefs about CAM were significantly associated with greater risks for nonadherence and poorer asthma control. Future research should assess the specific pathways that may account for these associations among CAM use and asthma outcomes.

Emerging adults use text messaging as a principal form of social communication, day and night, and this may compromise their sleep. In this study, a hypothetical model was tested linking daytime and nighttime text message use with multiple sleep characteristics. Subjective and objective measures of texting and sleep were utilized to assess 83 college students over a seven-day period during an academic term. Greater number of daily texts, awareness of nighttime cell phone notifications, and compulsion to check nighttime notifications were significantly associated with poorer subjective sleep quality. Awareness of nighttime notifications was significantly associated with higher self-reported global sleep problems and more sleep disruptions. Results suggest potential benefits of targeting nighttime texting habits in health promotion efforts for emerging adults.

Introduction: The college years are characterized by psychosocial and biological phenomena that may impact mental health, such as heightened sensitivity to social stressors and compromises in sleep quantity and quality. The current study uses a biopsychosocial approach to examine the associations among interpersonal stress, Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), insomnia, and mental health. Methods: Survey data were collected from 283 undergraduate students (90% female) with a mean age of 21.4 years. A path analysis was utilized to test a mediational model linking interpersonal stress and FoMO with mental health through a mediator of insomnia. We hypothesized that higher levels of interpersonal stress and FoMO would be associated with higher levels of insomnia symptoms, which would in turn be associated with poorer mental health. Results: As predicted, insomnia partially mediated significant associations of interpersonal stress and FoMO with mental health. The association of interpersonal stress with insomnia and mental health was more robust than the association of FoMO with these variables. Conclusions: The pathway from interpersonal stress and/or FoMO, through insomnia, to compromises in mental health may be modifiable through behavioral interventions focusing on coping skills, sleep hygiene, and even technology-related habit changes. Recommendations to help disrupt this pathway, particularly among college students, are discussed.

Adolescents' and emerging adults' social interactions increasingly revolve around cellphone use, but little research has investigated the psychological properties of cellphone interactions. The current study explored co-rumination via cellphone; that is, the use of cellphone functions to excessively communicate about problems or negative feelings. Faceto-face co-rumination and co-rumination via cellphone were examined as potential moderators of the association between perceived interpersonal stress and psychosocial well-being (i.e., positive mental health and social burnout) in a sample of 142 college students. Face-to-face co-rumination was not a moderator. However, co-rumination via cellphone was a significant moderator such that higher levels of perceived interpersonal stress were associated with lower levels of well-being only among college students who reported higher levels of co-rumination via cellphone. Co-rumination via cellphone should be further investigated to elucidate its developmental trajectory and mental health correlates.

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